


From My Father

by always_teatime



Series: Where the Woodland Meets the Wild [1]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Clover's fishing pole is a family tradition, Fix It, M/M, Rainbows, V7C12 hinted spoilers, fair game, origin of Clover's semblance, the love story between a god and an old fisherman that nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:08:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22626097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_teatime/pseuds/always_teatime
Summary: All things considered, the God of Life is a bit of a hypocrite. After all, he too meddled with the balance for someone he loved.Many generations down the line, as a result of that love… Every time Clover dies, he’s brought back to life at the bottom of a rainbow.
Relationships: God of Light (RWBY)/Pilgrim - Clover's Ancestor (OC), Qrow Branwen/Clover Ebi
Series: Where the Woodland Meets the Wild [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1672831
Comments: 23
Kudos: 107





	From My Father

**Author's Note:**

> Clover's point of view is at the end. Everything will be fine. The bulk of this story before that is about the origin of why he's fine, and also his hereditary luck semblance.
> 
> Spoilers are only obliquely referenced. No violence or details on those.
> 
> There are references to slavery and forced labor on a fishing trawler in the pilgrim's, Clover's ancestor's, past. Way past. He old. There is only comfort in the present and freedom in the happy ending. I'm noting this because for some, the references may rate high for a G.

There were odd religious sects in the old days. The God of Life never thought much of them. Periodically, cults would send a pilgrim, and Life would deny them miracles.

One day, a man came up the colonnade and knelt beside the shining oasis. He was old and dressed simply, with an air of nurturing and patience. He prayed: “O god of the light, please appear and speak with me.” He waited there a long time as the sun moved across the sky.

Despite himself, Life felt his curiosity growing. He emerged from the first green tree that ever sprouted in the land, at the center of the crystalline pool of clean water that was the essence of life, and said: “Greetings, human.”

The pilgrim raised his wizened head. “Thank you,” he whispered, with a sudden intensity.

“Why do you thank me already?” said Life irritably. “You have not yet asked for anything, much less received it.”

“Where I come from, the elders say the gods don’t care about us. I was told they wouldn’t do the smallest thing to grant me happiness. They told me never to pray, never even to speak. To hope was to suffer, they were sure. But I asked you appear today, and so you have. I asked you to speak with me, and so you already have.”

Life paused. “You have odd ideas of what a miracle should be.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I think the most divine thing we can do is to take the time to extend our own hands when others reach out to us. The elders must get their ideas from people who don’t understand that simple lesson.”

“You say elders like you’re not one of them.”

“I wasn’t, when I left.”

The God of Life had some omniscience—when he chose to, at any rate. He looked now into the backward, down the long road the pilgrim had been on. There was the desert and an old man, mountains and cities in his middle age, villages and forests and tundra as a young man, then finally a child crawling across a grassland, acres and acres of it turning red, behind which was the beach and ocean. Where there was pain. Black and gold dust on the water, choking poisoned plants, and pain.

Pain like this often sought divine answer. Healing perhaps, or revenge. Perhaps this once, Life might grant forgetfulness. “Why did you not go to see my brother, god of death?”

“I will meet him sooner or later anyway. The elders always told we are all promised to him. And that’s fine. But I wanted something else for myself first. A journey perhaps, briefly to know the god of life.”

So it was that the pilgrim settled down in his old age by the eternal spring, and Life knew him. Oh, he knew him. Every step and every shaking breath, all the joys and sorrows of his life. It humbled Life to have given the pilgrim’s soul a reason for his journey, which had turned into such a beautiful living. Tell me again about the hospitality of strangers, Life with his golden antlers would say, and the pilgrim did. Show me your hand and let me feel where you broke it against the anchor, Life would say, and the pilgrim did. Lie down with my ear on your chest and take a breath so I can feel it, Life would say, and the pilgrim did.

The pilgrim said things always worked out for him. He was patient, and he saw the good in all turns of fortune. He trusted wherever he was, was where he needed to be. Life could not hide his happiness upon hearing that.

“I saw clovers,” Life murmured, once.

The pilgrim paused. “I do not share this with anyone,” he said at last, “but I will share it with you. I ground down bones and wood chips to make soil, and watered it with rain. It captured seeds somehow on the wind. Those weeds were a joy to me, and to everyone else. I could get them talking over that patch of secret ground. It is how my grandparents finally told me about you.” He shook his head, shaking off his somber air, and smiled. “Oh, and there were gold flowers, too. That was the first time I learned how much I could like the color. To this day, I dislike it on money. Hence my poverty.”

“The first tree is those peaceful creations’ relative,” said Life. He took the pilgrim’s hand and tilted his antlers toward the island at the pool’s center. “It is almost like they were eager to meet you.”

One day, Life plucked a leaf from the first tree and offered it to the pilgrim, after the pilgrim told a story about sailing another leaf like a boat on the water—blowing with mortal lungs toward it from a great distance and seeing it stir. When the pilgrim dropped this leaf into the water, it began to glow with serene light. They sailed it around for a while, then turned away and forgot about it.

They spent more days and weeks together, the leaf floating periodically by. It seemed to still be alive, and it still glowed softly. Perhaps one day it would be a tree. Reflections seemed to be different in a small circle underneath it, especially Life’s and the pilgrim’s. It would often blur them together. The God of Life could not explain why, but he liked it when this happened, so they would often sit by the leaf as they talked about wondrous impermanent things.

One day, Life decided. “I won’t give you up to Him.”

The pilgrim knew the God of Life meant his brother, Death, and smiled. “Well, now I suppose I’ve done it, then. I must be the only old man who’s come here not wanting to live forever, yet you’d give it to me. And I don’t even accept. I didn’t come looking for an endless life. I just wanted a good one. A full one. One the lucky men get before their next adventure. And I’m glad I got to have that with you.”

The leaf in the pool gleamed and glowed softly near them. It pulsed gently now at regular intervals, sending out barely perceptible circles in the pool.

“Is there nothing else you want while you are here then?” asked the God of Life.

“Is that all people do? Ask you for things?” The pilgrim shifted to lean more weight sideways onto him. “Can I give you something instead? What have you always wanted?”

“Well, I am creation.” The God of Life looked pensively out over the world’s landscape. “I always wanted children. But I already made them. I made your kind too much like me, and because of that, there is suffering.”

“There’s more than suffering.”

“Sometimes more is hard to see.” Life hesitated. “When I look at cruelty and selfishness, and when I see people putting their pride before others’ pain… It is like I’m looking at myself, and seeing my failures. This is why your kind feel abandoned by me, and why I don’t help you. I tell myself it’s out of love. Maybe if I stay away and don’t interfere, you’ll have the chance to grow up better than me. You called me perfect, but I’m flawed.” He shook his head. “The choice leaves me lonely.”

“I always wanted children, too,” said the pilgrim. “I wanted to raise them, but not to create them. Maybe you could create one for us. I already have my miracle in meeting you. But a child might be a nice way to keep it going. Maybe they can help connect you back to the world. I don’t want you to have to be alone.”

Creation was the very definition of Life’s job. This prospect of reviving purpose felt… good. Good, but still frightening. “I would have to make them in an image. And my own clearly will not do.”

“Well, maybe I could help you.”

“If you help… yes. I am willing to try once again. I will create a child not in my image this time, but in yours.”

“In both of ours,” said the pilgrim, “I insist. You are the one I’ve chosen, and should take the compliment.”

Life bowed his head and held his hand over the leaf in the pool, which had been doing the blurring trick again. Maybe it knew a long time ago what it was supposed to be. It was a cutting from the parent of all plants, and it had grown quietly, unexpectedly powerful as it bathed in the water and breathed their bond. In surprise, Life stated, “There is very little even left for me to do. You know well what you’re growing into, little one.”

Through a magical spell older than time, Life melded together the leaf, the blurred image under it, and the feeling of being together with the pilgrim, and raised a new person out of the pool.

Their happiness stretched the pilgrim’s life longer. They had time to raise their child, who was able to build fond memories and love both parents before setting off into the world with a sack of supplies tied around a fishing pole the pilgrim had fashioned to be balanced on their shoulder.

The pilgrim at that time was very old, and he had rubbed his aching hands after every touch he added to the fishing pole.

“I thought you said you would not work like that again,” said the God of Life. “That our child would not. You would not allow it.”

“This is different,” the pilgrim said. He wiped a tear from his eye. “That is not how we fished. We used nets and cages. A rod is for a free person, independent, able to live off the rivers and pools in the land, to breathe the outside air, and not to be taken by the sea.”

Their child turned to wave a final time and to flash their bright smile before disappearing into the distance, rod and travel sack bobbing behind them.

On that day, fresh water fell from the heavens for the first time in Life’s sanctuary, and as colors scattered out from his prismatic skin, Life felt a step had been taken back toward the world again.

###

Clover kept his eyes on Qrow until the very end. “Good luck,” he said. Make him smile. Show him love.

Then the scene around him changed, and he was at the beginning again.

A rainbow poured down from heaven onto his shoulders. He always woke up from what was supposed to be his death like this, at the nearest rainbow to where he fell. And there were always clovers and golden dandelions around to cushion him, even in tundra and the dead of winter.

His father had told him how their family’s semblance worked, and how they were blessed. The God of Life forbade violence or sickness to take them, but permitted old age as an end, as that had been the choice of their other ancestor, the pilgrim. They were blessed with good fortune as well, as that had been the pilgrim’s power in the time of magic, ensuring that a life of journeying and random chance delivered the best of all possible endings to a fisher who was patient enough.

It hurt him sometimes to think of the place his ancestor came from, of the ships where their fortune could have died. They had been kept for drawing a fat catch, forced to throw the rope and haul nets up alone. Obedience was beaten and forced into their blood, until in one act of freedom, flying over the edge, the long ago first pilgrim trusted to a better end in the distance, somewhere. And in the end he had been proven right.

Clover shot a glance back over his shoulder and up, along the rainbow bridge. He stood up slowly from the gold and green blanket it had set him down in, and he saluted. “Thanks, Great-Grandpa Sunshine.” He set off toward the horizon, where he could just make out Atlas in the distance.

It was a good thing his birthright was luck and time. At this rate he might need the whole half century to get Qrow to stop deflecting compliments.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for taking this journey involving a gender neutral leaf child with me.
> 
> The limited immortality and luck powers here are "hereditary" via love, not genetics, so they can be passed down to whoever Clover considers his heirs. And of course that's whoever Qrow thinks of as his. So Ruby, Yang, and anyone Ruby or Yang consider their heirs would also inherit the protection and good fortune, and so on down the line. Clover is going to surround Qrow with good luck and people who can't be taken away from him.


End file.
